Category Archives: Art

A favorite of many Assertions fans, Brad Neely is one of those people that are on such a level that to use the term “cartoonist” seems a shameful elision. His black-and-white work for Hunter Kennedy’s Minus Times (now seemingly moribund, or perhaps just sleeping) made one sit up and take puzzled notice, and his now-famous YouTube video is perhaps the greatest encomium to a Founding Father of our as-yet-brief era.

His arrival at new funny video provider Super Deluxe is the harbinger of deep incursions into your bandwidth and your productivity. Fear him.

Bruno Peinado has about six different approaches. Some of his works come out of Japanese paper-cutting (and do goofy shit with “Asian” visuals), others with reflectivity (like Jeff Koons but not annoying or trite), still others with material chunkiness, a Beuysian love for texture. All of it plays with scale and presence, alternately dominating a room or squatting bloopily in a landscape.

The hook about this guy is that he’s an anti-copyright reappropriator, but that’s a fairly trendy thing to assert these days and those who pay too much heed to the fact that he’s putting those elements in play risk overlooking their more compelling effects. A shared taste for plastic and common forays into Jordan-land means that he needs to have a beer with Brian Jungen, pronto.

Among his too-rare ventures into commentary on Africa, the US and Europe, there’s a reworking of the Michelin Man as an afrocentric cult item. While Bib is frequently seen in North America as a harmless history-of-design landmark with a winning personality, it’s worth keeping in mind that he’s the kind rubber face of an enormous conglomerate, a sort of European Mickey Mouse (did I fail to mention that Disney gets it too?).